Michael White was voted Britain’s least boring music critic by listeners of Classic FM. He has made documentaries about Menotti, Britten and Nielsen and once attempted to explain Wagner's Ring Cycle on TV in half an hour. He's the author of two books: Introducing Wagner (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (HarperCollins).

Opera's most outrageous stage director cleans his act up (more or less) at ENO

It's standard practice in Calixto Bieito shows that scarcely anyone ends up un-raped, un-bloodied, un-fellated, and with a full bladder (after the inevitable urination scene). His abrasive toilet-theatre style is carefully cultivated to present a challenge to the average opera audience (to the performers too: it’s hard to sing with someone else’s genitalia in your mouth). And when his infamous Don Giovanni opened at ENO back in 2001 it provoked the most comprehensively hostile critical response I’d seen in years of opera-going.

"Puerile vandalism", "subtle as a donkey" and "stomach-turning rubbish" were among the milder comments. And Bieito’s defence that he read Don Giovanni as a piece about urban youth having "a really bad night out" didn’t help. By general consent it was a show that failed to notice when a stage-narrative about trash simply becomes trash. And along with Bieito’s later ENO staging of A Masked Ball (where the curtain rose, unforgettably, on a row of 14 men squatting with their trousers down on 14 open loos) it contributed to the list of misjudgements that just a memorably brought down the company’s then boss Nicholas Payne.

But Bieito himself is a survivor. He's just had a show called Forests running at the Barbican Theatre which combined cut-and-pasted Shakespeare quotes with earthy symbolism, songs, and the expected elements of nudity and violence – although not as much as in the past. In fact for a Bieito staging it was fairly lyrical, to the point where you might wonder if he was losing his touch.

Now comes a Carmen that returns him to the scene of his old crimes at the Coliseum. And by comparison with its antecedents, it's a model of propriety. OK, it's not a picture-postcard view of sunny Spain: a Catalan, Bieito obviously has issues with his homeland, and this show lays bare a culture of machismo and enforced Hispanic gender roles with all the rawness of an episode of Shameless on location in Seville.

But in the middle of it is a fascinating re-interpretation of the standard, dark and dangerous Latin femme fatale. The singer here, Romanian mezzo Ruxandra Donose, is blonde and obviously Eastern European. And she edges the role into a different archetype: the sexy, strong but sympathetic woman who knows her own mind and shines out in the shabby world of chavs and cheats that she inhabits.

That Elizabeth Llewellyn's Micaela is also warm and seductive makes for lack of vocal contrast but draws the two women together in their competition for Don Jose ( he clearly falls for the same type). And though Adam Diegel's Jose isn't so interesting, its nicely projected with a smooth if tight resonance.

With fabulous delivery from the ENO chorus (whose energy in the bull-ring crowd scene is so infectious you hardly notice, still less worry about, the absence of matadors and picadors processing past in pretty clothes) and clean, fresh, vigorous orchestral playing under Ryan Wigglesworth, a seriously emerging talent, in the pit, this is a good show. Brazen, in your face, but purposefully (for a change).